Referential gestural communication in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

摘要

Humans commonly use referential gestures, for example pointing, which direct the attention of recipients to particular aspects of the environment [1]. The use of these gestures has been linked with cognitive capacities such as mental state attribution[2,3] because the recipient must infer the signaler's meaning. In our closest living relatives, the non-human primates, referential gestures have been reported only in captive chimpanzees interacting with their human experimenters [4] and human-raised or languagetrained apes ([5-7]; but see also [8]). Here we provide the first evidence for the widespread use of a referential gesture by wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).